Sunday, February 5, 2012

If my blog is to be believed, I haven't done any sewing (hardly, anyway) since I last worked on pants in May/June last year. After a couple muslins and lots of tweaking I ended up with 2 wearable pairs of pants from Burda 04-2009-119 and a non-wearable muslin from the Hot Patterns Plain & Simple pattern. The last tweak on the HP pants was to take a vertical tuck in the front at the crotch to try to get rid of the fold at the inner leg. I never got around to cutting out a wearable version with all my adjustments.

Now, I need to start again because I lost weight all last year and the pants I spent so much time on last year DO NOT fit ! For the past week or so, the front fold and the underbutt wrinkles were on my mind. Apparently I'm in good company as I see the pants fitting threads have sprung to life again on PatternReview recently.

So, more reading, more thinking and yet still no sewing. I've been trying to see in my mind if a vertical fold would work better than all of these horizontal folds and tucks to eliminate the underbutt wrinkles. During all of this thinking, I came across a book I got about 12 years ago from Angelina Di Bello. She taught in Montreal for years and had quite an impressive working history. She trained in Italy and Montreal. Taught in Montreal for like 40 years or so and she also taught on tv on TV Ontario `Pins & Needles` as well as a couple of French tv shows. This spanned 35 years or more if I remember correctly.

Anyway, I own 2 of her books, one being, 'all about pants'. I've read through them but they are pretty hard to read. They are textbooks after all. On this pass through, I picked up that her fix for a flat butt is a vertical fix not a horizontal tuck, or wedge.

Today, I pulled out my last pattern version of 04-2009-119 and took a vertical tuck from the crotch to the knee. I also managed to lay out the legs and trace 1-1/2 pieces. My back had enough by then.

Here I am now...This is 'the fix'...

...in other productivity notes...I baked today - hubby asked for cookies last week and I made 'em today - soft, raisin cookies - I don't imagine they'll last long !